With the emergence and success of services like Heroku for simplified development and hosting, I am pretty sure this is the next natural step. I think these kind of services, with development, revision system, deployment, hosting all integrated, with be huge within a year or two.
The big question here is: is Tim Ferriss that self-righteous naturally, or does he do it on purpose to gain more attention?
Few people can deny that being so self-righteous that other people get provoked is one hell of a personal marketing strategy. I just keep wondering if the people who succeed in personal branding have thought this out and planned their self-righteousness strategically, or if they just are that way naturally and got lucky.
Couldn't part of this problem be solved with an algorithm that identifies when several pages have roughly the same content (ie. original wikipedia article + 5 copies of it elsewhere on the web) and then giving the oldest occurance in the index a much higher rank?
That would kill incentive to create these spam-sites and give the user the result s/he was looking for.
All you people suggesting "do both" - do you really know what you are talking about? We may have different definitions of what a startup is.
If by startup, you mean a one man website that is some kind of low-maintenance subscription service, then yeah sure, go travel the world.
But if you define startup as I do, as a venture-backed, aggressively growing company employing people, then how the hell are you going to travel the world while managing that? Please tell me if you have a way, because I would be genuinely interested :)
TextMate is getting older and older. I would like to try something else, but I haven't yet found another editor with a sane file/folder sidebar, which is a must for me. Any tips? The sidebars I've seen for emacs and vim either look lika crap or use too big a font for them to be practical.
Of course the definition of success is different for every entrepreneur. My definition of success in this case is a sustainable company that is still alive and growing after 5 years.
Maybe the formulation of my question wasn't very good. What I meant was more like "How many percent of startups who get funding are still in business five years later".
I think it is fairly normal to go through the wannabe-phase. We all do it until the moment that we realize we aren't getting nearer any goals, and decide to become a doer instead of a talker/planner.
About two years ago I tried a lot of different frameworks and languages to find which one would suit me best. After having tried various PHP frameworks, J2EE, Perl I arrived at Django/Python. The plan was to continue on to Rails after Django, but I loved Django so much that I couldn't imagine that Rails could be any better. Seems like I was right ;)
Like the author, I too think Django's default directory structure doesn't work very well once you start doing bigger projects. But luckily, everything is so loosely coupled that you can change the directory structure entirely without too much work.
I remember reading the book "The Sovereign Individual" which was written in the 90's. The authors argue that as the internet becomes more abundant, cybercurrencies will become popular and over time make it very hard for governments to collect taxes. This would in turn change the world in a lot of different ways.
Since I read the book, I have been waiting for someone to create something like this. It will be exciting to see if this will work and if "cyber currencies" will become more widely used.
Funny you should mention hand-painted rock business as a counter-example. I presume you haven't heard of the massive success of Pet Rocks? Basically the story I was told was that Gary Dahl had a bet with a few friends that he could sell any product, no matter how stupid or useless, with the right packaging and marketing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock
Thanks! One more question: Had any problems with using third-party Python libraries? I mean like PIL, cjson or stuff like that? Heard something about C-based libraries not working?
About where do you usually hit the limit for free usage? Are we talking hundreds of daily visitors? Thousands? Tens of thousands? I know this varies heavily depending on your code, but does anyone have a good rule of thumb?
Let me put it this way: How do you think Apple has become as big and successful as it is today, despite always releasing products that are technically inferior (ie. Mhz/megapixel/megawhatever) and often more expensive than the competition? Could there me more to a product than the hardware specs?